While annoying, this is actually very normal for most compacts, and I've been told it's because the noise of the motorised optical zoom would be too obtrusive in the recording. The only cameras which seem to allow it are those superzooms which don't use motors to operate their zooms - such as the Panasonic FZ50 or Fujifilm S9600 / S9100. Some models may alternatively allow a digital zoom during video recording.

That said, I think they should still allow the optical zoom so long as they warn us about the sound. After all, some of us may just want to capture the video and intend to put different audio over it during editing - and besides, the audio on most digicam video modes is pretty ropey to start with. I hope this is something they manage to address on future models, as the video quality is certainly getting very good these days.

Gordon

PS - I wonder how bad the sound of the optical zoom motors would actually be anyway? Then again you can heard the actual tape transport working on most camcorder recordings...!

t_m_butler
I think there is another reason for this restriction: If you move the camera while recording a movie you immediately recognise the deterioration in picture quality. I imagine that with the zoom you will have such a bad quality while zooming, that the manufacturers just disabled that feature.
Unfortunately the movie-mode of todays point'n'shoots does not make video-cameras obsolete...